The Nationalist Critique of Female Double Suicide in Colonial Korea

Abstract

During the colonial period, the double love suicides of young “new women” were sensationalized by media outlets and became the object of discussion at a national level, triggering discourse over the role and value of women in Colonial Korea. This sense of involvement in the life and death of women was even more prominent when these suicides involved young women of child-bearing age, whose deaths could be collectively perceived as a loss of an important human resource for the country. This article will examine why the media focus was on young, educated upper-class women and how the discourse about their suicides expanded beyond a moral cautionary tale and was coopted by the Korean nationalist movement. We analyze the discourse that followed two representative female double suicides, the Yun/Kim suicide of 1926, and the Hong/Kim homosexual double suicide of 1931, focusing on the critique published mainly in the Tonga Ilbo newspaper. We also examine the response of the feminist movements, or lack thereof, and the development of the ideological conflict between feminist and nationalist movements. Female suicide was one of the many battlefields between the nationalist and the feminist movements during the colonial period. As an issue involving women at every level of society, it had the potential to challenge the Confucian patriarchal system and bring to light the new needs of Korean women. However, as this analysis has shown, it was dismissed as a personal and trivial matter compared with the urgent public issue of national liberation. The rise of women's movements in Korea, fueled by a small clique of educated women, was ultimately subsumed by the nationalist movement and relegated to the realm of the private and inconsequential.